One man's adventure mapping Durham and beyond, not knowing what lurks round the corner.

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There was a lot of effort put into organising The State of the Map(SotM) conference, and it was a success. I was one of two Code of Conduct volunteers (for want of a better title). Some would point out I have related experience helping people in conflict, however this kind of role at a conference was very new to me. As part of our SotM work, we are writing documentation/guides to help future events run more smoothly. I want to write notes on what I did for my role, then I thought it would be good to share these publicly and allow feedback. There were no major cases to deal with, so this is not the most comprehensive post in the world to explain the issues and troubles of enforcing a Code of Conduct(CoC).

Andy Allan is a name that most OpenStreetMappers have come across. He started with the project in a similar fashion to me, just somewhat earlier than I came across it, and he usually has something new to say/share at the annual conference. His insight gave me new insight into Cloudmade and the commercialisation of OSM data. The chapter may not make sense to people in the community now, but that’s more reason to read it and discover what history you’re missing.

Tom Carden focuses a lot on OSM’s original data structures, which is more relevant to the project than people give credit. He also talks about the starting of OpenStreetMap and it’s raw thought of “whatever, let’s just get people drawing” that powered building good-enough tools to achieve the objective. That thought is still strong with a lot of people, avoiding committees and scheme/tagging design processes. Big news to me was that Stamen wasn’t founded on OpenStreetMap, but existed before and shifted to focus on making beautiful maps as part of it’s design business.

Kate Chapman is another name that’s well-known, but not someone I’ve known as personally as others, the book does well to engage readers from that level. Kate of course focuses on the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), but very much the official US-based organisation rather than the wider collective of OSMers. She talks about the staff 25+ staff of HOT, and how there are only 90 members, which makes it very different organisation to OSMF.

Martijn speaking at an OpenStreetMap conference.

Steve Coast credited as founder of OpenStreetMap and was the interviewer for all the other chapters, yet you couldn’t miss him from such a book so he was interviewed by Adam Fisher(noted within the book’s introduction but not when getting to this chapter). It’s obvious when reading that Steve was interviewed after he had done all the other interviews, my thought is that he should have been interviewed first so that we could know what his memories and thoughts on the history are. Some of Steve’s answers were long comments on the future industry which are more suitable for a different book written by Steve.

Martijn van Exel gives the view from a mapper and community member instead of another person that was previously involved in Geo. That community-view includes a whole page talking about the Dutch food at the State of the Map conference in 2009. Martijn tells of how every individual can make a difference, because we see different things to be done. Read this chapter if you feel you’re a newcomer to the project with not a lot to offer!

Andy’s favourite map… Putney in London, where he first started mapping with OSM and experimenting with cycle information.

Richard Fairhurst was behind another collaborative map project, which I’ve always know but not the detail and what story was. Steve and Richard’s conversation allows for honesty amongst friends, and so we get the best view why OpenStreetMap went far during a landscape of several similar projects even with some truth about from Steve’s part.

Ben Gimpert is not a name I had hear before. He seems to have been friends with Steve in the early days, and hanging around the tech scene. This didn’t add anything to the OpenStreetMap story for me, but it does give an insight into certain happenings of London at a specific time.

Sean Gorman again was around in the early days, and tells us what else was happening in the world of Geo. Sean also talks a lot about humanitarian issues with geographic information, and how OpenStreetMap can be used to help them. It’s a great chapter for reading about other organisations, that OSM isn’t alone but can work together with them.

My summary review…
A book with wonderful content on the history of a vast project called OpenStreetMap(OSM) it will help you discover the background of OSM which is essential if you wish to understand today’s OSM. Highly recommended reading for academics starting OpenStreetMap projects and also recommended as an enjoyable light read. Unfortunately the very poor sub-editing and lack of layout design or pictures lower the quality of the book.

What is this book?..
The Book of OSM is Steve Coast’s latest Kickstarter-funded project, and I mark it additionally interesting as it’s the first OpenStreetMap book that is not a instructional guide. Instead, it focuses is on the history of the OpenStreetMap project through the medium of 16 interviews. A lot of people in the community seem to have reservations about buying this book due to it’s author causing controversy or personal upset, however as I started to read the book I quickly came into two strong thoughts about the actual content and quality of the book of OSM. I’ve been jotting notes as I read the book and it turns out there’s a lot of comments I want to make so this will be an overview review and in a later blog post I intend to focus on the various chapters of the book.

Using interviews as the storytelling mechanism of the book was a brilliant choice by Steve Coast, it also seems to provide a quick way to get a book completed. Steve pointed out he deliberately limited editing of the interviews he conducted. Unfortunately this results in varying lengths of interviews. Long ones can cause you to forget who it is and why you care about hearing the same sub-story again, in contrast one chapter was so short it might have been better cut from the book. A little extra production quality could have taken place such as the chapter in the header and some images to make flicking through enjoyable. I am rather upset that the book is badly subedited, even down to a lot of inconsistencies with spaces in “OpenStreetMap” where such errors could have been fixed by more responsible transcribing or simple find and replace when proof-reading.

My more detailed thoughts…
Moving on to the actual content of the book brings much more positive review possibilities. A common focus is the way in which people of different backgrounds and skills came to know and to be part of OSM, along with who they think should feature in the stories being told. There’s very little forward-thinking or predections, maintaining a historical narrative.

“…background understanding that many academics are missing when they approach OpenStreetMap related projects.”

It dawned on me that this would be really good as prerequisite reading for academic researches. There are references to the licence change, the “do-ocracy” of OpenStreetMap culture, and also API and technical history.​ The questions that get answered and tales that get recalled would easily provide background understanding that many academics are missing when they approach OpenStreetMap related projects. There seems to be very little coverage of the OpenStreetMap Foundation with more focus on HOT OSM as both an informal movement and a legal organisation.

Having participated in the project since 2006 it was fantastic reading the book and looking back to some shared memories of the early days. Despite my long-term involvement, there were still new things I learnt about friends in the project. Other readers will perhaps get enjoyment out of the chapters that interview people whose names they know, even if they don’t know much about how their interviewee’s background led into OpenStreetmap.

I want to talk more about it…
Of course not all the key people could be interviewed in one book. At times the interviewee choice seems amazing and other times it seems like you just have a collection of Steve’s mates. Perhaps in 10 years time, another volume of this book will be written and people who would be best to include in Vol 2 might not even be in the OSM project yet. To review this book as a whole and rate it out of 5 is really difficult when the quality between chapters/interviewees really vary. My following review post will hopefully give you an idea of which chapters have the most captivating reading, along with the insights and enjoyment I personally took from them. You’ll still have to read it all to get the full experience, including when interviewees push in their (not always glowing) thoughts about Steve Coast himself.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is currently holding it’s annual election for board members, anyone currently a paid-up member of the foundation should have received instrctions on how to vote electronically this year. Sadly none of the board members due to step down are running for re-election (3 must do so each year, usually those who have served the longest). I even privately contacted one supporting that they stay on the board. This seems like a trend, I wanted to create a graphic to illustrate what I suspected. Wonderfully the OSM Wiki details history of the OSMF board as a table, similar to the graphic I imagined but I decided to make something more visual anyway.

Most of those elected to the board in 2007 stood for re-election at least 3 times (pink dots show two stood for re-election but didn’t get enough votes). For board members that joined from 2010 onwards, they are more likely to step down than to stand for re-election even once. I appreciate fresh minds and enthusiasm being welcomed onto the board, but some consistency is also beneficial. However I think there is a question here, are board members having enough? Do they feel they don’t accomplish enough or find their efforts are met with personal attacks rather than gratitude? Or perhaps, people just serve on the board for the same reason as students, “it looks good on your CV”. It would best to question this trend, and seek answers so we can address any problems.

I also wanted to look at the questions asked to candidates, I knew less of what to expect. I’ve grouped them into categories below.

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

OSMF Role

2

1

1

1

2

OSMF workings
& transparency

2

1

4

3

Conflicts of interest

1

2

2

Diversity

2

2

2

1

OSM Participation
(of candidates)

1

1

2

Membership increase

1

2

OSM Future

1

1

3

1

License

2

2

1

OSM data/technical

1

1

1

2

2

Total questions

8

9

3

3

15

16

It’s difficult to make conclsions of anything exciting out of this table. Others could comment on that, or be motivated to look at the questions & categorising them. Or how about making a word cloud of each year for the questions, and a word cloud of the questions+answers?

I’ve taken many photos of bins while surveying. Pictured is node 3760474534.

Picture the scene: It’s 2008 and for a year I’ve been the only one mapping Durham, taking it from just the motorway and river to a detailed geodatabase of roads, footpaths, and even significant buildings before there was aerial imagery to trace from. Then suddenly I notice several amenity=waste_basket nodes while editing. I don’t notice them on the rendered(displayed) map, because they don’t appear. In the database they even have an elevation value added (do we need to know how high above sea-level a bin is?). They’ve probably been imported from a handy source but not one that OpenStreetMap has permission to use, I’m going to have to tell someone this is wrong and then fix it.

I keep my cool, I send a message to the user who added them. I consider the tone to be a greeting and intrigue, but there is suspicion underneath.

I noticed you’ve now mapped some bins in Durham, that’s quite a bit of dedication! I wondered if you have actually gone out and surveyed these personally, or if you’ve found some data to import?
Also, as they don’t appear on the ‘main’ maps, do you know of something that is displaying OSM maps & bins, or using the data?

It turns out I had mapped “everything” in the city centre of Durham, so one of the few things left for this new user was to map bins. They don’t appear on the main map, but they do exist there and so in the spirit of OpenStreetMap I leave them. After all, the response I got did include “but you never know who’ll find such data useful, or when“. The user went on to map South of the city with lots of detail along footpaths, including stiles and hedges and inspiring me to map as detailed as her.

Durham City, with amenity=waste_bin nodes shown in a screenshot from Overpass Turbo

It was some years later, maybe 5 or so, that I was making a custom map of Durham’s clubs & pubs for the purpose of StreetLights volunteers. Part of what they do is pick up glass bottles and bin them before they smash and cut people’s feet. Ah, handily I can take all the bins from OpenStreetMap and display them on this specialised map. On other occasions, I’ve used the data to confirm when I think the council have removed bins in really helpful places.

At the most recent Durham Maptime I was retelling this story, how it’s amazing how much geodata exists and we’re not even seeing all of it. We zoomed into the map to query the history of the data, but ah what are those cupcake-like icons we saw? The bins now appear on the default map of osm.org! I’ve now looked at the stylesheet code that gets tracked on github, and bins have been showing (along with benches) since the start of this year. It shows that if you map something, it might become popular enough that it appears on maps used across the world, and if not you can still make maps of the features yourself to encourage others to map them. As of writing, there are over 133,000 bins mapped across the world, 7,000 of which are in the UK, approximately 200 being in Durham city!